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Looking for a good backup solution

Hello all,

I'm a self-employed developer/college student. I'm a little worried right now, because my external hard drive just died (the only thing I really lost was my music collection... thank god for Pandora), and I am afraid that my laptop hard drive (which is approaching 3 years old) may be next. I've got everything on here, all my development files are kept on a local repository, all my dbs are running off a local mysql server, I've got school docs, photos from the last six years, lots of stuff that I cannot lose. I am looking for a good backup solution that I can trust (am a bit paranoid about external USB hard drives right now) and that can run be run automatically. I have Ubuntu Linux on my laptop.

My preference would be some sort of online backup-- and the most-mentioned that I've heard about is Amazon s3. However, I can't really find anything that works well with Ubuntu/S3, especially if I want incremental backups (I don't have a big budget). Does anyone else have a better recommendation? This is one of those things that I always have in the back of my head that I should do, and I never get around to it. That seems to be everyone's last words before their drive dies and everything is lost...

Go for making a CD and putting it somewhere safe. Ive also used Acronis True Image, which can create an image of your computer and its files at a certain point and then you can return to that point (with all your files) at any time using the image file (which you could put on a disk/usb)

While it is understandable you are paranoid over external USB drives, they can hold a good amount of data, they are very cheap and efficient and if you buy a couple of them, you can make two backups onto identical drives so you have a second in case one fails on the off chance it does, this would cover your bases well as you should always have more than one copy of a backup.